A law professor and political scientist in Silicon Valley. Follow me here and on Twitter @StephenFDiamond.

And I thought conservatives had a mind of their own….

The Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece recently that caught my attention. It’s here. It’s an attack on the shift in Obama’s human rights policy apparently written by Brett Stephens and appearing in the WSJ on October 19.

The only problem is that it looks an awful lot like my two blog posts more than a week earlier here and, to a lesser extent, here.

The repeat by Stephens of the cut-off in funding to the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center was what got me thinking, are conservatives now turning to the democratic left for the substance of their critique of Obama?

Of course, Stephens puts a typical neo-con twist on his piece, accusing Obama of “appeasement.”

My view is that Obama’s policy of “strategic reassurance” is a return to realism from neo-conservatism – that is, a view that we care less now about what is happening internally in countries like Iran than whether Iran is simply a national security threat. That’s what led me to write this earlier blog post: Obama – a liberal mugged by real politik.

It is unfortunate that some of our nation’s leading human rights advocates like Harold Koh and Michael Posner are now providing a kind of fig leaf for the new Obama policy by serving in the Administration.

I critiqued the “new realism” taking hold within the human rights community here. I argue that the broad human rights agenda should be the basis of independent movements for democracy not a rationalization for imperial American foreign policy

I emailed Alan Murray, executive editor at the Journal, to ask him to compare what I had written with what Stephens wrote, but got the typical “mailbox full” response. It’s the same old one way street between the blogosphere and the MSM.

Ironically, the last time something like this happened it was The New York Times. Three of their reporters interviewed me five times about the longstanding relationship between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers, but then ignored the critical evidence I provided demonstrating that Ayers appointed Obama as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. They made an oblique reference in the story (by Scott Shane) to bloggers without having the integrity to actually cite me. You can read my reactions to that incident here.